Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb

In recent decades, the American suburbs have become an important site for immigrant settlement. Beyond the City and the Bridge presents a case study of Fort Lee, Bergen County, on the west side of the George Washington Bridge connecting Manhattan and New Jersey. Since the 1970s, successive waves of immigrants from East Asia have transformed this formerly white community into one of the most diverse suburbs in the greater New York region. Fort Lee today has one of the largest concentrations of East Asians of any suburb on the East Coast, with Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans forming distinct communities while influencing the structure and everyday life of the borough. Noriko Matsumoto explores the rise of this multiethnic suburb-the complex processes of assimilation and reproduction of ethnicities, the changing social relationships, and the conditions under which such transformations have occurred.

Reviews of Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb

"In this fine-grained and engaging study of a multi-ethnic community just outside of New York City, Matsumoto uncovers the changing dynamics of American suburban life. This book will appeal to those studying urban sociology, race and ethnicity, and immigration."–Andrew Deener "author of Venice: A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles "